Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
A British mathematician who became an American philosopher.
(1861 - 1947)
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A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace.
[Civilization]
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A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity.
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A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.
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A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
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A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
[Writers And Writing]
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A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.
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A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.
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A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.
[Civilization]
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A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
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All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts': all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles.
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Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
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An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
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Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
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But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
[Technology]
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Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
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Common sense is genius in homespun.
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Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.
[Creativity]
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